On 16/12/06 01:13, "Chaswe@AOL.COM" <Chaswe@AOL.COM> wrote:

Stan Kelly-Bootle also wrote:

Re-Anglo-Saxon: Charles protests far too much and without due process, methinks, against the use of the old term OLD ENGLISH to describe the vernacular Germanic language[s] prevalent in Anglo-Saxon England between about 600 --1100 CE.

Quote: “my conclusion has been that Anglo-Saxon is not "Old English", any more than Latin is "Old Italian", or "Old Spanish", or "Old Portuguese", or "Old Roumanian". The use of "Old English" by modern lexicographers is tantamount to the anticipated collective decision of future lexicographers, five hundred years hence, to describe the language of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans as "Old American".”

Charles: you are correct in saying that “Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English” are not of that rare breed “exact synonyms.” Just as  the adjectives “American” and “American” are only synonymous in certain contexts!! For example, Anglo-Saxon can be used to describe both a tribe/society and its language[s], while Old English (in the sense you object to) applies only to language: the later, emerging “combined” stages of the four main dialects rumbling round our sceptic Isles (Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, West-Saxon [Wessex]).

Your straw-person analogy with “calling Latin Old-Italian” is cunning but, to borrow Pauli’s Nabokovian phase “so wrong it’s not even wrong!” When we lexicographers (some of whom are genuine linguists!) use helpful but inevitably imprecise tags such as OE (Old English), ON (Old Norse), OF (Old French), OG (Old German), MI (Medieval Italian), ML (Medieval Latin) etc., they are tracing word origins back to earlier known (or highly plausible) forms of that particular language. They often add further hints such “F via OF via L [Latin] via PIE [Proto Indo-European] via NS [Nostratic] via E [Edenic]” but I digress. The evolution from various vernacular Latins to the Romance languages you mention is relatively simpler than tracing how all those multiwave Romans, Huns, Scandinavians, and Normans combined to shape the Modern English of Shakespeare [!] via what we USEFULLY call Old and Middle English. I hope it’s clear that ‘Old English’ has ‘earned’ its place in the linguistic lexis (object away, Charles, it’s here to stay!) — along with Old French, Old Norse etc. Calling Latin ‘Old Spanish,’ though, is LESS helpful because Latin ‘spawned’ many branches in many disparate ‘colonies.’

Stan Kelly-Bootle



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